Windshield, More meetings, IX we go again

I upgraded my monitors at work from two 19″ 4:3 format screens to two 24″ 16:9 format monitors yesterday. Wow, what a difference.  It is like I have a windshield size view into my cyber-reality.  It’s is pretty f’ing awesome, I have to say.

Last night after work I had a running club board meeting, followed by another meeting.  Despite having double the meetings, we actually finished up in less time than some of our regular meetings go.  After the meeting I headed to South Street with the core drinking crew and had a few beers while harvesting the normal amount of good laughs from the guys.

I didn’t feel like I was an equal opportunity contributor.  I was feeling a bit “locked up” conversationally, probably due to the big full moon.  Not only can the moon send my mood into a tailspin, it can make my speaking more difficult than normal.  Words just don’t want to flow.

So I am having issues with  IX Webhosting again.  On Monday all of my sites were down for close to two hours because of some power outage at their facility, supposedly.  Well then yesterday I get a dreaded TOS email, saying that my websites were once again consuming too many CPU cycles in their shared server environment.  As a result they turned off the biggest consumer of these cycles, the Bar-barians website.

So I called them and got the site turned back on with a promise to look into things on my end.  When I did look at the usage stats for my domains, I was confused.  It looked like the traffic being used was very low, nowhere near enough to consume the amount of CPU cycles they claim I was using.  Since I enabled the Cloudflare service on my busiest domains I have not had any issues with excessive usage due to Cloudflare’s caching and traffic filtering.

I replied back to IX telling them to look at my domain usage stats and that they did not seem to match up with the CPU usage they claim I was utilizing.  I didn’t hear anything back from them.

Then this morning there is another email, they once again killed the domain.  Included with the email were updated usage numbers that sounded absolutely ridiculous:

CPU minutes:

Aug. 20, 2013   825.18
Aug. 19, 2013   1426.28
Aug. 18, 2013   1275.42

For reference, their normal limit for daily CPU usage is 60 minutes.  When I had all my problems back in Feb/Mar when the new site launched I was consuming around 200 CPU minutes at it’s peak.  According to this email I used SEVEN TIMES more than that on Monday, it just made no sense, especially when I reviewed my domain usage stats.

The first number is number of visits, then number of pages, number of total page hits and bandwidth consumed.  For comparison sake, when the site first launched, I had days where the bandwidth used was 5 GIG with 100,000 page views per day.  The traffic now thanks to my efforts with caching, tweaking and implementing Cloudflare is a fraction of what it was.

So anyway, the end result is now I have to trudge through this with them to figure out what is going on.  One guy said something about all requests are not being logged correctly to the stats I am seeing.  He said that almost all of the traffic is coming from hitting the “store” I have on the site which is simply a plug in that connects to the BB Paypal account.  There are not many sales going on so I am not sure where all the hits would be coming from.

Regardless of what the final cause/resolution is, it already has exceeded my daily patience allotment.